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VMware has released version 2.6 of its vCloud Connector tool, and dropped its price to $0. At current exchange rates that's £0 and $AUD0, for UK and Australian readers.

vCloud Connector does what it says on the can – connect clouds. It's assumed one of those clouds is your very own vSphere-powered private cloud and that the others are public clouds also running vSphere. The product offers an interface that offers users a view of all their workloads no matter which type of cloud they're running on, plus tools to shuffle them about.

An advanced edition of the product also allowed users to create a catalog of workloads that could be synced across private and public clouds, then lets you deploy them to any private or public cloud you decide to use on any given day. The product also takes care of network issues by ensuring it is possible to move a workload to go from the private to public cloud without having to mess around with changed IP addresses at either end.

Until yesterday, vCloud Connector came in two versions. The core edition was free to vSphere and vCloud Director users, but lacked the content sync and networking features mentioned above.

Today there's only one version, vCloud Connector 2.6, it includes all the features and it's free (although you still need e vSphere and vCloud Director to make it work).

Why has Virtzilla made the product free? Vulture South's guess is that customers of its own vCloud Hybrid Service (VCHS) may have wondered just why they need to pay extra for a utility to use a hybrid cloud. There are also suggestions that VMware's hosting partners are a little upset that VCHS competes directly with them. Making vCloud Connector free reduces one barrier to adoption of hybrid clouds hosted by VMware partners, which could be a way to throw those partners a bone or perhaps even show them there is lots of demand if they chose to take a step up and host a VCHS rig.